Love's Pilgrimage

Book excerpt: In Love's Pilgrimage, Grace Tiffany explores literary adaptations of the Catholic pilgrimage in the Protestant poetry and prose of Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, John Donne, John Milton, and John Bunyan. Her discussion of these authors' works illuminates her larger claim that while in the sixteenth century conventional pilgrimages to saints' shrines disappeared - as did shrines themselves - from English life, the imaginative importance of the pilgrimage persisted, and manifested itself in various ways in English culture.